Television was treated like a controlled substance in my house. I was allowed two puffs on it after 6pm and then it was off and reading or school-work or being bored and daydreaming about having a sibling for me to play with. We didn’t have cable, we didn’t have sweets in the house, we didn’t have too much. We had a Datsun that sometimes got stolen, a three-legged bench that occasionally fell apart, and a closet that housed Jeff, my imaginary friend who protected me from scary shit that otherwise would live in the closet.

In short, we lived like proto-Amish people that liked over-cooked tempeh.

But when I spent the weekend at my grandparent’s house it was on. My own private Rumspringa. I’d wake up at 4 in the morning — before programming even began — and watch the test patterns, just waiting for the first Hannah-Barbera cartoon to start. I’d tip-toe into the kitchen and drink sugar-free chocolate soda and eat all kinds of weird old-world sweets while my grandparents slept in. It was glorious. I’d have a stomach ache by 7:20AM.

Eventually, my grandparents would wake up and want to have a fun day with their grandson but I’d be so tired from my early morning escapades that I’d just beg to be left alone so I could wallow in my own exhaustion. It never worked. Eventually I’d have to get dressed, and we’d go to the South Street Seaport, or The Science museum, or to Chinatown for dumplings.

One weekend they took me to the holy of holies: the museum of Television and Radio. At the time it was simply an archive filled with old programs that you could take out of their giant library and enjoy in private booths. Sort of a clean peep-show.

My grandparents had taught me all about the old radio comedies and I had cassettes of “Fibber McGee and Molly” and “The Bickersons” and the old “Abbott And Costello” comedy shows. At the museum we borrowed tapes of the “Who’s on first” routine and listened to them over and over again.

That year I decided I wanted to have my birthday at the museum. We rented a screening room and a group of friends watched the Mary Martin version of “Peter Pan.” It would have been enough, as the song goes, had we only been shown Peter Pan, but what was truly the prize of the day was seeing my very first VCR.  The man cuing up the movie for us kids explained what a VCR was and what it did and how it worked. “It’s like a movie theater in your living room” he said.

I wanted one. Badly.

So my dad got one. Which is to say he bought a Betamax from a friend of his from TaiChi class and so we were stuck with an interim technology and a twenty minute drive to find the only place that rented movies on Betamax. But, it was like having a movie theater in our living room. And I was happy.

Eventually we’d get a proper VHS and the Betamax would move to the closet only to be taken out when Jacob, Amit, and I wanted to lip sync to Cure songs with egg whites in our hair. And eventually Blockbuster opened up in town and we got to see all kinds of exciting movies that I never would have believed possible.

And then eventually I found myself in a film class in college. On the first day of class the professor made an announcement: “we will be watching a film today, there will be no eating, talking, and making any noise of any kind during the film… the problem with the advent of the VCR is that everyone of you when watching a movie think you are in your fucking living room. You are not in your fucking living room, so be SILENT DURING THE FILM!”

Now I rent movies on iTunes and watch them in my living room to escape the people that were so completely ruined by the advent of the VCR.

All of this is to say: I still have a VHS. Recently I used it to watch my grandfather tell me a story I never knew.

I should re-listen to those old comedy shows…

In highschool this meant auditions for the musical, hackysacking in the stadium, and cutting school to drive up to camp to get stoned. The winters would be these depressing piles of grumpy Cure songs and Jazz Band rehearsals, but spring…spring was hope, spring was tee-shirts and skirts, spring was falling in love.

Suddenly I’d talk to girls again, suddenly we’d hold hands, suddenly we’d never mind all the discomfort of adolescence and fall into each other’s clutches fumbling towards adulthood — something I’m still in the process of doing.

I haven’t done a cover in forever. I used to do them all the time, and then I did them less of the time, and then I did them never, and now I’m in my hallway-office typing one of these things out.

I missed you. There I said it.

The (barely even close to) nightly cover is back. In the next few months I will tell you tales of camp plays, embarrassing first dates, the pain of childhood, and lots of other stuff.

But for now, let’s just leave it at this: let’s fall in love again, me and you. Let’s bleed for each other and sing songs for each other and tell each other all the lies that make us feel so good. It’s spring. That’s what this is for.

Tonight’s cover is “Hemophiliac Of Love” – by King Missile. As always suggestions/requests are more than welcome, they’re basically essential.

Until next time, a never ending stream of love.

It was said of Karmazinov that he valued his connections with influential people and with higher society almost more than his soul. it was said that he would meet you, show you kindness, seduce you, charm you with his ingenuousness, especially if he needed you for some reason, and most certainly if you had been recommended to him before hand… — Dostoevksy “Demons”

Naomi and I have an argument. It goes like this:

A: What did you think of my story?
N: Yeah, it was good.
A: What “yeah it was good”?
N: Well, you know. I mean it’s like I always say…
A: Oh come on!
N: No it’s just that it didn’t happen exactly like that, you know?
A: That’s what story telling is all about.
N: Lying…
A: Exaggerating!

That’s when Naomi shrugs and goes back to her work and I sulk out of the bedroom to rewrite my story so that it’s more factually correct. Interestingly enough the story is almost always better the way it really happened.

Take the first story I ever told at The Moth. It was about a visit to the concentration camp Majdanek and coming to grips with the difficult but important lesson that sometimes the past should be allowed to crumble and that sometimes forgetting is the most powerful response to trauma. In the pivotal moment I’m sitting on a bus in the concentration camp and two skinheads give us the Hitler salute. I storm down the aisle to the door where I come face to face with what turns out to be a teenager who lives just on the other side of the fence, overlooking this mass grave. The lesson? both of us are victims of this terrible past.

That’s how I told it at the Moth. In reality I didn’t run down the aisle of the bus to rip his head off. I sat, plastered to my seat with fury and rage, and fantasized about running down the aisle of the bus to rip their heads off. In truth I was too scared, too stunned, and too human to do that. Which makes for a better story. But for some reason I thought it would be better to tell it the other way. The next time I tell it, it will be the truth.

Today I listened to This American Life’s retraction of Mike Daisy’s story on their show. It’s stunning, and scary, and wonderful, and everything that any episode of TAL tends to be. Just as the original Mike Daisy story was. You should listen to them both if you can find the Mike Daisy original, I presume at this point it’s been taken down from official sources. At the very least you should read about it. The upshot is that Mike Daisy went to China to research the labor practices at Foxconn for a one man show about his Apple computers fandom. What he finds is chilling and evocative and he tells us about it in a breathy voice that drops to a dramatic hush as he describes his encounters and his own fears.

It’s good theater.

Which is, coincidentally Mike Daisy’s argument when confronted by Ira Glass about the revelations that key dramatic moments in his story were fabricated. His mistake, as he puts it, is to have allowed This American Life to air it as a piece of journalism when, in fact, it is a piece of memoir – theater.

In memoir, as in storytelling there are allowances for certain untruths. We combine characters, we compress time, we exaggerate a moment for comic relief. Maybe the woman was just plain-looking in real life but in the story she was pear-shaped and I threw up on our first date (actually in this case not an exaggeration at all). But listening to Mike Daisy squirmy interview with Ira about fabricating facts and inserting himself into things that he had only heard about, I couldn’t help but think of Dostoevsky.

In Demons the narrator describes a journalist named Karmazinov that he disliked:

About a year before, I had read an article of his in a magazine…He described the wreck of a steamer somewhere on the English coast, of which he himself had been a witness and had seen how the perishing were being saved and the drowned dragged out. The whole article, quite a long and verbose one, was written with the sole purpose of self-display. One could simply read it between the lines: “pay attention to me, look at how I was in these moments. What do you need the sea, the storm, the rocks, the splintered planks of the ship for? I’ve described it all well enough for you with my mighty pen. Why look at this drowned woman with her dead baby in her dead arms? Better look at me, at how I could not bear the sight and turned away. Here I am turning my back; here I am horrified and unable to look again; I’ve shut my eyes–interesing, it it not?”

This is Mike Daisy’s sin. And mine as well.

It’s so tempting, all one has to do is shift the story a little bit and then the focus remains on the teller. There were thirty Jews on the bus who all witnessed the skinheads, I could have told of the gasp from the Swiss girl, or the “holy fuck!” from the Australian, or even the firm hand on my shoulder from my seat-mate and good friend, Adam. I didn’t have to be the one running down the aisle for it to be powerful.

In the interview with Ira, Daisy says he wanted to make people excited and interested in this important story. Naomi says that was the moment that she felt sorriest for him, and understands what he did. I say that this is his biggest lie. Every fabrication he made was done with one single thing in mind: to make the story more exciting, not by exaggerating truth and fact, but by inserting Mike Daisy into places that Mike Daisy wasn’t.

In the interest of telling the truth, I never finished “Demons” by Dostoevsky. It was too long and the Russian names started to wear on me.

Inside there is a pot of expresso simmering on the stove next to a pot of chicken next to a pot of rice next to a pot of yucca sandwiched in between a pot of beans and if it weren’t already breezy from the coming afternoon cold front, the house would smell like heaven. Instead, it smells of a fine layer of dust that blows steadily in through the slatted windows from the construction site across the road, where canvas bags of Chinese concrete lay half-opened amongst rebar and a few bags of garbage that a short dog roots around. They should change the coat of arms of the revolution. It shouldn’t be a hammer and sickle anymore, it should be a bag of Chinese concrete and a pile of broken window shades that still sit in the courtyard of the new building that no one will have removed because ultimately it’s not for them to say and anyway it’s probably better to not start problems.

But the expresso smells good and it’s sweet and hot and that’s what one wants from coffee in the tropics so we sip it and listen as the day slowly congeals outside the open windows and doorways.

Now the family gathers around the Television playing news from the potato harvest which looks to break 2011 records, and though that’s exciting it’s nothing in comparison to the news from the ministry of transportation which is glad to announce the improvement of almost 300km of roads none of which could possibly be in the city based on how things appear. Then the broadcast switches to sport and how the Industriales are trying to climb their way back to supremacy but the short stop seems to be underachieving and it looks like hustle has nothing to do with ideology.

There is conversation about nothing and then a few long breaks as everyone smiles and basks in the warmth of family and friends new and old. G___ smiles deeply with two gold caps on his bottom teeth and lifts a hand for a high five exclaiming “¿increible, no?” And, of course, he’s right. Whether it’s the smile on his three year old, or his wife that’s half his age, or the music that now plays from the television, or the stillness of the air, or the cold front that’s coming and will sweep the Malecón with wild waves and sea spray, whatever he means he’s right.

Soon M____ arrives with a smile and his 72-year-old frame that looks like he may as well be 40 and from High bridge or Fordham. He needs to use the intranet for a minute to email a tío or auntie or somebody that the Committee doesn’t mind him being in contact with, so G____ leads him into the back room and while he types away G____ plays him the newest music from the band that everyone’s talking about and they laugh at the singer who references the old ways in the kind of way that is invisible to only those that are versed in the deep history of the music here. The revolution se gusta música y las bellas artes. The revolucion se gusta beautiful things and socialism. The revolution is crumbling on Crespo street near the fading façade of the Hotel Deuville where right now a couple from Hamburg argues over the cost of a taxi ride to the bar where Hemmingway drank Daquiries while a few young men watch wearing open shirts and shoes without socks and that’s how you can tell who’s a tourist and who’s not anyway.

But it’s unspeakably beautiful.

Havana is the kind of place that you return from and want immediately to go back to. It’s the kind of place that you want to speak about but speaking about it pushes it further from your memory, it dissipates it into a fine mist and you can’t remember if that corner still exists, if that bread will ever taste that way, if the banner proclaiming “Socialismo o Muerte” was actually ever really there.

By the Hotel Nacional, we walked past movie theaters and people wandering up long stretches of streets where only a Lada struggled up the hill. If you squinted and blurred the edges you could believe you were in East Germany in the 70s but then it’s warm and there’s music and the smell of cigar from the balcony and we’re running out of time and the sun is setting and we should get a drink before it’s too late, before the tourists return from their day trips. We don’t want to fight for a table, we don’t want to be elbow to elbow with the rest, we want our illusion to last as long as it can: that we are the only tourists in the only city on Earth.

Later, in my room while writing this, I’ll try to make a story up. To tell the truth in fiction that I cannot communicate in description. I’ll invent a barely fictionalized version of me and Naomi walking along the same road on that same day.

They turned up past the memorial and then walked past the other memorial and then up the boulevard with the banner that stretched across exclaiming “Socialismo ó Muerte.”

“Where are we going again?” He had been distracted over breakfast and over lunch and now, in the shadow of one of the old hotels — the ones that sparked the revolution and now serve some of the best Mojitos around, you really ought to try one – he couldn’t remember where they were headed.

“I want to see the inside. I’ve always pictured it and now I want to see it. We can sneak in past the security guard and ride the elevator and pretend we’re Meyer Lansky and some hot broad that he picked up outside the Tropicana.”

They turned past a transvestite waiting outside the underground cabaret across from the Hotel Nacionál onto the grand driveway.

“It’s beautiful,” she said and pulled their camera out and snapped a dozen photos off in rapid succession. “Isn’t it just…I’m not sure what to even call it. It’s like architectural driftwood.”

“Yes.”

“It’s like that’s what all of this is. You know the difference between here and say Grenada, for example? Here it’s architectural driftwood. It once was and now it’s not. There it was pretty much always not.”

He smiled, he liked when she talked like that. “Let’s get a drink.”

To Whom It May Concern —

I am a staunch supporter of President Obama, having volunteered more than once during the campaign including get out the vote in North Philly on election day. 

On more than one occasion I found myself walking into the apartment of a profoundly poor person and asking them to please get in our car so that we can drive them to the polling site to cast their vote. In one such apartment a man with a recently amputated leg’s daughter begged us to fix health care — US! As if our influence could ever extend past that afternoon. 

I’m writing to you because in the past weeks I’ve received numerous invites to donate and to win opportunities to meet the president. Yesterday President Obama arrived in New York for a fund raiser that I’m sure will raise millions of dollars, but I couldn’t be there because I don’t have millions of dollars.

In this age of Occupy Wall Street, when the nation is turning inwards and examining itself in a way that it hasn’t done in decades, I find your email not only tone deaf but insulting.

Yes, the campaign must raise money. Yes, I would like to see a second term. Yes, I believe that the President has work to do. Yes, I believe that it takes money in this climate to make that happen. 

But, I also believe that connecting money with access is one of the most upsetting and destructive trends in our current system. I know you are only asking for three dollars, and that may seem to be a pittance. I can afford three dollars. I can afford one hundred dollars. But there are many people in this country that cannot but more importantly shouldn’t have to.

I don’t know how to change this system – -that’s why I’m not in office — but that is why I voted for President Obama, because I believed that he would. 

As the gap between rich and poor grows greater and greater every day, I call on you as leaders of this Nation to change your practices to find new creative ways to give access to those that need it most: those that cannot afford the donations, those who you promised you’d represent.

I sincerely hope that this message finds its way to an actual person.

Good luck and see you in the campaign.

Aaron Wolfe

Last night I played music with a legend. A man who founded some of the most important freaked out folk bands in the history of freaked out folk music.

Peter Stampfel founded the Holy Modal Rounders, he played with the Fugs, Dylan, and many many others.

Last night he played with Jeffrey Lewis. About mid-way through their set they played this song. He introduced it as having been written by his ex-old lady. Later that night he told me he couldn’t remember the words to it and the original recording was long lost so he just made this one up.

When it was over, I wiped the tears away from my eyes and decided to record it tonight.

I hope you like it as much as I do.

The final verse is stunning to me. I can’t be sure but I’m fairly certain that he’s describing death as a dance and that, to me, belies an understanding and sensitivity that is other worldly to say the least.

Wrote this yesterday.

I used to be on the scene. Not the capital “s” but the little one where the beer tasted good and people gathered on Tuesdays in small numbers to eat pickles in the back of Mercury Lounge while a 20-Something worked out their nostalgia with an electric guitar. I used to play a gig, get a sausage and wander a few avenues over to watch the up-and-coming play the deep-and-heavy. It felt good. I liked it.

I’d smoke cigarettes and muse about how we were around the corner from my the store that my grandfather sold monuments out of. We were impressed by history. We played Sin-e because Buckley played there, and we played Arlene’s because it was once someplace too.

I tried haircuts. They were mostly bad. I stomped and sweated through my shirt. I fell in love over and over again at every show. Then I’d strap my bass on to my back and head home alone but happy.

Jason bought a van, and we headed to Hal Daddy’s in Baltimore. I ate a crab cake by a blown out strip club and hurried back inside when it got dark. Baltimore was terrifying but Hal Daddy’s was even scarier. Everyone looked like a killer. The opener was a death metal band. Then it was us. Then it was an old man with his teenage sons playing blues tunes. I mellowed out, the road would be fun.

We travelled all over the Northeast. I can tell you all about the rest areas from D.C. to Maine. I can tell you what kind of rug works like a blanket and what kind just feels itchy and dirty. Sometimes people got laid, mostly we got drunk. Rock-n-Roll lifestyle is headaches and neck pain. We slept in the Van a lot.

For three years I never drove into NYC before 2AM. To this day if I arrive back to the city from somewhere in day light it feels like cheating. When we’d drive over the Koskiuzko Bridge and see all of Gotham and her lights we’d exhale. We called the road “the heart of darkness,” and our city felt good to us.

In New Hampshire I quit smoking twice.

In Vermont I almost broke Jon’s arm.

In Albany we ate wings.

In Poughkeepsie there wasn’t a stage, or electricity, or any clue that a band had ever played there before.

In King of Prussia there was almost a fist fight by the dart board, which is almost a story.

In D.C. a girl in leather pants kept showing up. She showed up in Boston once, too.

In Providence there was a side show and a book mobile.

In Philadelphia we broke a commemorative glass and almost got thrown out of an old friend’s house.

I started entertaining myself by stealing things from bars. Little things, stupid things, like pint glasses, and then drink shakers.

When the band broke up, I started over with my own band. The scene was still there, I knew all the bookers, the bar tenders, the backlines, the green rooms, it would be easier this time.

It wasn’t.

You can’t keep asking friends to come out and fans don’t exist once you’re 30.

Sin-E closed and Arlene’s became a punchline.

The scene in Brooklyn flourished but who am I kidding? We played Glasslands and it was packed. It was one of the greatest nights of my life. A few weeks later it was back to barrooms and a dozen people yapping about football. It’s hard to emote while someone orders extra peanut sauce from the Thai place around the corner.

We stopped rehearsing. I started recording covers. I stopped recording covers. I started work again on my screenplay. I listen to too many podcasts. NPR has ruined me for music.

Tonight I went to see Jon’s band. They are good. They played up the block from my Grandfather’s old monument store. On the subway ride home I listened to Fugazi, then I listened to The Cure, then I listened to Sloan.

I got out of the subway and started the track again. Then again. Then again.

Remember the last scene of “Dazed and Confused”?

“Hitchin A Ride” By Vanity Fare

I know nothing about this song or this band, other than my good buddy Alan Kaufman requested it and it’s goddam perfect. I love a one-hit-wonder like this. I can basically picture the Vanity Fare guys running a music school outside of Manchester or maybe they own one of those pubs that aren’t really pubs but are kind of social halls/retirement homes.

Maybe I’m feeling a little kinship with them. It’s a week until my appearance at the Moth GrandSLAM and I’m terrified. Not that I’ll barf on stage or accidentally start shouting anti-semetic slurs or anything like that (though I feel like that would be pretty cool) but more that I’ll discover that, like Vanity Fare, I’m a one-hit-wonder too. So, with that in mind, I – like Vanity Fare – will be appearing at the Moth GrandSLAM in a velour onesy with my name on my belt in glitter.

Anyway, this one’s for Alan.

“Time After Time” By Cyndi Lauper